


Hell

by Harukami



Category: Coldfire Trilogy - C. S. Friedman
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-21
Updated: 2012-05-21
Packaged: 2017-11-05 18:07:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/409422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Harukami/pseuds/Harukami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Originally posted Oct 2004</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hell

Hell is empty, an ancient Terran novel had said, and all the demons are here. Tarrant could believe it, for more reasons than just the Fae and how they worked.

He sat in his library, candles lighting the room, as he'd had the windows sealed hundreds of years before. It was always dangerous, candles around open flame, and fire was no friend of his, but there were easy enough ways to douse it with the fae, should there be a problem, and after so long without any such problem it was difficult to worry about it.

Tarrant tilted his head back, letting thin blond hair brush his shoulders; if he were going to go out to meet his company, he would dress himself up in robes and wind himself about with cloth, but as things were, he'd decided it wasn't worth the effort, and wore simply a blue silk dressing gown that rode low on his shoulders. It had been a long time since he'd felt the chill. As he sank his consciousness down into the earth, expanding with the fae, he watched the army advance.

They'd come prepared, at least, with various sunlight-kissed items and blessed weapons and for a moment he tastes wryness in his mouth, an emotion that, had it come years earlier, would have been the difficulty between knowing whether to laugh or whether to cry. As things were now, it wasn't much of anything at all.

It wasn't the first time the Church had turned on him. The moment he had tried to make them accept the fae as a science, understandable and controllable, he'd been dubbed sorcerer, an ironic twist -- because anything that was believed strongly, the fae could act upon, and when the Chuch called him a sorcerer, and declared that sorcerors went to hell, what could the fae do but create a hell, just for him?

I am your Church, he thought at the army as the ground rose up around them, as the dirt erupted with maggots to suck them in and provide more nutrients to the soil, as trees they brushed against held them fast. They couldn't hear him, but honestly, they hardly had to. And really, you did start it.


End file.
